Many customers desire to order items or goods remotely, e.g., online, through the Internet, or using a specially designed application or app on a mobile computing device, such as a tablet or cellular phone. The customer may also desire that the items or goods set forth in the customer order be assembled and ready for the customer to pick-up at a specific location, e.g., at a particular store, typically at a specific time.
For pick-up orders, the store often sets or identifies a time slot for when the customer order will be ready for pick-up (such as, e.g., between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm on Monday, Oct. 31, 2016). Typically, the customer order is filled and ready for pick-up at the beginning of the identified time slot (such as at 2:00 pm in the previous example). However, in some instances, the customer may not arrive at the store until the end of the time slot (such as around 5:00 pm in the previous example) or shortly thereafter. For grocery orders, particularly if the order is filled at the beginning of the time slot, certain perishable items could spoil and/or frozen items could thaw while waiting for the customer to arrive to pick-up the order. To prevent this spoilage or undesirable thawing from happening, the store associate may wait until the customer arrives before filling the order. However, such method for filling customer orders is inefficient, and often undesirably increases customer wait time.
The present disclosure is aimed at solving the problems identified above.